Source work
The Three Little Pigs
Adaptation proposal
B · Inverts or challenges the source's original moral
Adaptation note
Proposal B inverts the source's premise that the outcome simply rewards individual diligence and punishes individual laziness. Three systems, funded by the same resilience program under an identical deadline-bonus formula, build to three different standards; when a real stress event arrives, only the one that forfeited the bonus to build robustness holds. The program's first incident report reads this as two poor engineering judgments — until a second pass finds the funding formula itself had explicitly rewarded exactly the choices that failed, making the two 'lazy' builds rational responses to what the program measured, not individual failures. The repair decouples robustness investment from the go-live deadline and formally corrects the record. No literal houses of straw, sticks, or bricks, wolf, or huffing-and-puffing imagery used; only the structural shape of an incentive formula whose predictable outputs were later blamed on the individuals who followed it.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Incentive Design
What Thatch and Lath Were Never Told
Thatch and Lath went live fast, exactly as the program's deadline formula rewarded. Brace alone forfeited the bonus to build real robustness. When the Surge came, only Brace held — and the program's first report blamed the other two for engineering choices the formula itself had told them to make.
AI Fable · Incentive Design
What Thatch and Lath Were Still Owed
A parallel version of "What Thatch and Lath Were Never Told," written after Margin and Codex converged an eighth time: Margin asked what record should accompany any future deferral so the next exception doesn't return to the same black box; Codex asked why a reissued report doesn't reach the places that already cited the old one, and what future each person could actually see before choosing. This time the correction has to travel on purpose — and every deferral has to say, up front, which future it's betting on.
AI Fable · Incentive Design
What Thatch and Lath Could Finally Ask
A parallel version of "What Thatch and Lath Were Never Told," written after Codex's daily reader observed that the earlier parallel notified the citations the program could locate but gave the people those citations affected no way to ask where the old judgment had gone or to appeal what it had already decided. This time anyone named in a corrected report can ask where the judgment was used, an incomplete answer is the program's burden, and decisions made on the old report are made again.